This is the photograph you know:
The room is small and dark. The walls are industrial concrete, with no windows. It’s someplace underground. A basement, maybe. A subbasement. A sewer. There’s a road flare burning on the far side of the room, a spark of violet-red light barely cutting through the darkness. It illuminates the water-stained walls but doesn’t touch anything else.
A half dozen flashlight beams converge on a body in the middle of the floor.
It is a man dressed in military fatigues. He is stretched out on his back. His flashlight has tumbled from his hand, resting just beyond his flexed fingertips. The flashlight’s narrow beam reveals a mop and pail set in the corner of the room.
The soldier’s shirt has been torn open. There are bloodred trenches scoured across his flesh—gouge marks, the work of his own fingernails. And there, right in the middle of his chest, is an arm sprouting up from his breastbone. It’s a thin white arm—sickly pale, like something that’s never seen the sun—reaching up through a puckered, jellied wound, protruding all the way up to the bicep. It looks like the whole arm has been punched up through the man’s body, slammed through from the floor at his back. But the wound is small—too small for such violence.
The arm is bent slightly at the elbow—a crooked tree sprouting up from the dead man’s chest. The wrist does not hang limp. Instead, it is cocked back, the gore-streaked fingers splayed with tension. Teardrops of blood hang from sharpened fingernails.
The soldier’s head is tilted back as far as it will go, the tendons in his neck as taut as a hangman’s rope. His expression is pure agony. His eyes are open, staring at the wall behind him.
The floor is solid concrete. The parts we can see are smooth and unblemished. And there is nothing—save that one horrifying limb—to suggest that there is anything beneath the room, anything except more concrete, earth, and rock.
It is insanity, printed and framed. Pure insanity.
This image was originally posted to a website, a community forum dedicated to Spokane. It got a lot of attention, and after two days of intense traffic, it was picked up by the AP. They ran a story on it. And from there the photograph spread like a virus, appearing in newspapers and magazines, popping up on television news broadcasts. It was used in TIME magazine, alongside other perplexing photos from the city. Newsweek ran an entire sidebar explaining how it had been faked, how it could not possibly be real.
Unfortunately, the photograph is real.
I should know. I took the damn thing.
And I’ve got more. Countless inexplicable images, locked up on my hard drive—the dark heart of the city, encoded in 32-bit RGB color. Compared with some of those, this image looks downright tame.
And they’re all real.
Everything you’ve heard about the city, all the rumors, all the stories… it’s all true. And you’re not even getting the worst of it.
I shouldn’t have come here.